dition was no different from that of my fellow officers; that we were
all there in a camp of instruction learning our duties, and there was
not a moment to lose. I then began to realize something of the magnitude
of the task which lay before me. To do difficult things, without knowing
how; that is, to learn how in the doing, was the universal task of the
Union volunteer officer. I took up my "Army Regulations" and attacked
the ceremony of dress parade as a life and death matter. Before my two
hours were ended, I could repeat every sentence of the ceremony
verbatim, and felt that I had mastered the thing, and was not going to
my execution in undertaking my duties as adjutant. Alas for the frailty
of memory; it failed me at the crucial moment, and I made a miserable
spectacle of myself before a thousand officers and men, many of them old
friends and acquaintances, all of whom, it seemed to me, were specially
assembled on that occasion to witness my debut, and see me get "balled
up." They were not disappointed. Things tactically impossible were
freely done during that ceremony. Looking back now upon that scene, from
the long distance of forty years, I see a green country boy undertaking
to handle one thousand men in the always difficult ceremony of a dress
parade. (I once heard Governor Hartranft, who attained the rank of a
major-general during the war, remark, as he witnessed this ceremony,
that he had seen thousands of such parades, and among them all, only one
that he considered absolutely faultless.) I wonder now that we got
through it at all. Think of standing to give your first command at the
right of a line of men five hundred abreast, that is, nearly one
thousand feet in length, and trying to make the men farthest away hear
your small, unused, and untrained voice. I now can fully forgive my
failure. The officers and men were considerate of me, however, and,
knowing what was to be done, went through with it after a fashion in
spite of my blunders.

The regiment was one of the "nine months'" quota; it had been in the
service barely two weeks at this time. It was made up of two companies,
I and K, from Scranton (Captains James Archbald, Company I, and Richard
Stillwell, Company K), Company A, Danville, Pa.; B, Factoryville; C,
Wellsboro and vicinity; E, Bloomsburg; F and G, Mauch Chunk, and H,
Catawissa. It numbered, officers and men, about one thousand. Its field
officers were Colonel Richard A. Oakford, Scranton; Lie